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Overview

This is a very generic help topic and may not cover your particular crash at all. It is several years old and predates Fallout3. The advice was intended for Oblivion, but much is applicable to other games as well.

Crashes are a part of the Oblivion experience. It's the game's way of telling you that you need to take a break. :whistling:

There will always be some crashes, all we can do is minimize them.

Save often, it will keep the frustration level down.

Anything running in the background can cause a crash. Especially a program that likes to call home, such as an antivirus program that updates without warning, or an instant messaging program trying to connect.

Start

by disabling everything that accesses the internet when you play. That includes the Vonage, Skype, IM, xfire and anything that calls in or out.

You might even disable internet access altogether.

Many programs use an auto update feature - such as HP printers (how often does your printer driver need updating?)
MS auto update can cause crashes. Some of these will even try to connect when the internet is disabled, and keep trying every ten minutes or so. If you can, disable the autoupdate function, at least while playing. :(

Then look for programs that run in the background, they are stealing time from the game and if they don't give control back quick enough - crash. MS indexing service, antivirus progs that scan everything in the background, Auto defrag programs, Scheduling programs all steal cycles from the game. Any of these can cause crashes.

After you have cut down the crashes caused by external stuff, start looking at your mods. Some mods just don't play well with others. And for some the load order is very important. BOSS works for most load order problems, but it can't set them all. There are over 15,000 mods on Tesnexus alone.

Another often overlooked source of crashes is removing a mod. If you remove a mod that affects game play, it can cause a crash when something from the missing mod is referenced in game. The most common is the unable to enter Bruma crash. This is caused when you complete a part of the main quest with one character, make a new character, load an old save and try to enter Bruma with the new character. There is something (spoiler) in Bruma that references your old character - which is no longer in the game.

Then there are the Nvidia black screen crashes. A quick way around them is to disable both AA and HDR in your video settings. Then after you are passed the point where the black screen occurs, re-enable whichever you use. There are many posts telling what has worked for some, and not worked for others, along with several mods that help.

It completely eliminated my crash on exit as well as some others (but not all)

Note, it is not a mod and doesn't install like a mod, so be sure to read the instructions.

New info

A lot of unused .exe files left in the /data folder can cause problems. It seems that Oblivion likes to look through all of the unused files and even the extra folders in the /oblivion folder.

New recommendation, make a new folder - OUTSIDE of /oblivion to keep this unused stuff. such as Bethesda/Oblivion_Mods. Note that Later versions of Wrye bash already do this with the ghosting feature. If you have a folder for unused mods in your /Oblivion folder, move it into the new/Oblivion_Mods folder.

Essentially, clean up your Oblivion/data folder and move everything not needed in /Oblivion and /Data to a new folder outside of /Oblivion.

If you are keeping your original or copies of zipped downloads inside of the /Oblivion folder, move them out too.

Also, if you can, empty the windows prefetch folder it may be keeping info on older now unused mods, and Oblivion will look for them if it sees that they are supposed to be there.

You probably won't be able to get rid of all of them, but you can minimize them.

Crash on level up

Thanks to Maigrets for this bit of arcane knowlege:

Quote:
"This was an issue noticed when the 1.2 patch was released. You could download the Unofficial Oblivion Patch which fixes a multitude of problems in the vanilla game.

Or use this ini fix.

Find this line in your Oblivion ini file located in My Documents\My Games\Oblivion. (That's for Windows XP, I don't have Vista.)

STrackLevelUpPath=\\vault\TES4\LevelData\

Delete everything after the =

Save the ini and it should fix the problem.

When Bethesda released the 1.2 patch they left in a path to a file on one of their servers and your computer is probably trying to find it and timing out causing the crash.

I found this snippet of info a long time ago and kept it for my own reference even though I now use the Unofficial Patches for OB and SI. I highly recommend you do the same if possible. Just search Tesnexus. They are easy to find."

You can also try this FREE program It allows you to disable a lot of uneeded background processes and programs while playing, then with a mouse click put them all back when you are finished.
Game Booster:Link